We are SEVERE, the first high-end alternative digital magazine platform of its kind to launch this year. As a visual, shift shaping digital literary performance space, we exist on the boundaries of the big, the obvious, the flashier brick. We occupy the outskirts, but we would never wear actual skirts.

We are proud to be the only magazine in the world to resist the use of contractions as they are a widespread and violent form of textual repression and verbal abuse. Do not get drawn in by the high subscriber rates or accolades of other publications that force a poor hard-working auxiliary verb to shove a negation directly up its own ass to make a justified page marginally pleasing. We would never do that. At SEVERE we would scream out word rape. Like this, “WORD RAPE!”

We are looking for those strong SEVERE voices: women, gender-nonconforming, non-heteronormative, even paranormal writers, anyone speaking from the experience of living or not living or writing in the now that is never over or the always that is gone before it ever began or from a place that has never existed before. In short, we are very open. We are not looking for men.

WHY WE ARE

We saw that our “language,” what we have decided are the formic and oral constructs interpreting voice (or often our voicelessness . . . or even our silence) must be more than written, more than cold keys pressed to a flimsy board; these amorphous subjective vessels must be thrown with the clay of our hearts and fired in the kiln of our collective aching soul, which can then (after it has cooled, of course) be filled with the soiled dirt of a thousand years of feminority servitude, which can then be watered with rivers of ink soaked in estrogen tears to form a flourishing, verdant garden of expression. If reading this failed to sexually arouse your mind, well then, your work might not be right for SEVERE.

WHAT WE ACCEPT

Your submissions must display “language” that is at once subtle but also radically incisive, both coming in at the edges and bubbling up from the center of our literary bowels (much like the vegan quinoa and kale stew from last night; your words should continue to stew inside us long after we have digested them), as well as doing that elusive something that makes us question motive, genre, meaning, and narrative itself. Narrative is word jail.

Ideally we will not be able to articulate, or anticipate, or even enunciate what we want: in a nutshell, we are hoping to be surprised. We want the going-over-the-top-of-the-rollercoaster intake of breath, the thrill that comes from writing that is confidently new and clearly on a forward trajectory, despite of the writer’s nagging parents and friends telling her to get the fuck out of her childhood bedroom and look for a job already. Go ahead girl. Make everyone suffer for your art.

WHO WE ARE

SEVERE is a collaboration between two of the most critically acclaimed wordsmithresses in an elite class of graduating English majors with an emphasis on creative writing from an especially prestigious East Coast (or Oregon) liberal arts college that is better than yours according to US News and World Reports. So there.

Alexandra Martina Pea-Waxsmith

Co-Foundress

Ms. Pea-Waxsmith is deeply invested in the idea of erasure as excavation as an effort to redirect gendered violence against the feminority voice. She has been praised in a review of her self-published debut book of poems The Innermost Orifice by outgoing professor of literature and up-and-coming literary critic Dr. L. H. Ashman for “demystifying the myriad ways that literature shapes the cultural phantasmagoria of the female orgasm.”

Anjee Beidier

Co-Foundress

In her first book, a riveting collection of stories based on years of solicitation-induced trauma in Girl Scout Troop #3416, Ms. Beidier replaces entire paragraphs of explication with powerful images of her own merit badges ironed onto the pages. The Note They Found on the Log Before They Threw it Into the Fire: and Other Stories of Samoas and Shame is available exclusively to readers of SEVERE magazine. The original manuscript is on permanent display at her home. (Email for more information!)

(Not to be confused with writer/photographer L.L. Ashman or photographer/writer H.L.H. Ashman)

HOW TO SUBMIT

In order to submit your work for SEVERE you must purchase one copy of either The Innermost Orifice or The Note They Found on the Log Before They Threw it Into the Fire: and Other Stories of Samoas and Shame and type the first seven words on page 27 from either book (there is a page 27 in Ms. Pea-Waxman’s book, keep looking) in the subject of the email. Send submissions to Judgingyou@SEVEREMAG.net.

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Sarah Haufrect lives and works in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Salon, the Berkeley Poetry Review and the now defunct Demockracy.com. She has an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley that is occasionally useful in social situations and can speak five different languages as long as they are printed on a restaurant take-out menu. You can digitally stalk her on twitter @smartypants_inc or send innocuous fan mail through her website www.sarahhaufrect.com.